1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of network-connected personal computers and, more specifically, to transfers of status and control information for such computers over a network.
2. Background
With personal computers (PCs) being increasingly connected into networks to allow transfers of data among computers to occur, more operations such a maintenance and updating of applications and data collections are occurring over the network.
As computers are also becoming essential to their users to perform their work it is desirable to shift the time when maintenance and updates occur to not interfere with productive work. Shifting the time for such activity is not an easy matter because the computers on the network (clients) are usually shut down at off hours and there is no one available at the client system to answer questions and take action at the direction of the network manager.
One solution to this problem has been wake-up technology, such as IBM's Wake on LAN technology which supports special signaling over a network to cause a client to power itself up. The network manager may then perform various operations on the client. This feature expands the ability of the network manager to do maintenance and upgrades but is limited to a single command to activate a system.